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Having sourcecode to everything would make me trust things more as at least we could fix things without calling MS. But what would you run? QNX? BSD?
by anonzzzies 2y ago
Having sourcecode to everything would make me trust things more as at least we could fix things without calling MS.
But what would you run? QNX? BSD?
- withinboredom 2y agoJust because you have the source code, doesn't mean you have the knowledge to fix it before you die.
- anonzzzies 2y agoSure, but without it, you stand no chance at all.
- exe34 2y agowindows is source-available if you have deep enough pockets: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-source-licensing-program.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-sour...
- anonzzzies 2y agoAnyway, I was responding to someone who wouldn't run either on a spaceship so I still would like to know what they would want to run. I am from a formal verification school of thought, so I would want something sel4.
- exe34 2y agoI'd want manual backup pushbuttons.
- foobar1962 2y agoAnd another box close enough so the CD tray can press them when it opens.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoDoes Microsoft also provide you the tools to build it? I assume there are many Microsoft internal tools, libraries, etc required to compile anything of note. Presumably it has been dog fooded for so long it would be impossible to bootstrap without some number of binary artifacts in hand.
- withinboredom 2y agoI feel like this misses the point so much that it might as well be nonsense. A better way to put my argument is: could an average mom build Linux on specialized hardware in space? If the answer is "yes", then you may have a point. I don't think the answer is yes.
- johnisgood 2y agoNo, but you can review the source code before (or at any point), whereas with Windows, you cannot even do that.
- withinboredom 2y agoI've occasionally worked on drivers for windows and linux. In either case, I didn't really need to read the source code; neither was it a valuable proposition. If the advertised API didn't do what it was supposed to, I likely wouldn't have understood enough to fix it: and this is my point. Just because you can read it, doesn't mean you can or will be able to actually fix it; not because of technicality, but because of personal knowledge. In this case, they are both black boxes.
- johnisgood 2y agoI mean, I agree, I am just saying that it is better (in general) to have the source than not having it.
- withinboredom 2y agoHow so? I once spent three days trying to figure out an issue, stepping line by line through hadoop (after figuring out the issue was in hadoop and not my own code). Yay, I proved the issue was actually in Java itself. Guess what happened next? We avoided the bug. Why? - We couldn't update Java. - We couldn't change hadoop because we were using a packaged solution. So, we just filed a bug with them. Had the source not been available, we would have just skipped all of that, and it would have been our vendor's problem 3 days earlier.
- icehawk 2y agoFor something like the spacecraft in the article, you absolutely would have the ability to get access to the Windows source code.
- exe34 2y agowindows is source-available if you have deep enough pockets: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-source-licensing-program.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-sour...
- GlenTheMachine 2y agoVxWorks, usually
- redleader55 2y agoIf you ever count how many patches are in between stable point releases - eg. 6.10.5 to 6.10.6, you'll see having the source code is not enough. All of these patches are fixes for something or another, not features, but fixes. If you look at an LTS branch, you'll see there are hundreds of point releases. Usually a point release is created once every 5-10 days. I interpret that to mean bugs were not found until many weeks after the LTS branch was cut. Obviously, not all of them affect you, but many patches apply important subsystems which affect you.
- ssrc 2y agoVxWorks, LynxOS or RTEMS. RTEMS is open source.
- inamberclad 2y ago+1 for RTEMS! Great fully featured RTOS
- perching_aix 2y agoMaybe sel4? I'm not in embedded so maybe I'm being pretty silly here, but I think being formally proven and realtime are pretty good things to have in the case of an expensive, long lived space project. That said, this is on the scale that I'm surprised off-the-shelf things are even being considered. I'd have thought they'd just roll something bespoke and that's the end of that.
- rurban 2y agoBaremetal of course. If it gets complicated (ie threads): QNX, vxworks, L4.